Google employees revealed that the Python basic team was disbanded on the spot

What? Google fired its entire Python foundation team?

Everyone who worked directly with you, including your superiors, was laid off - oh, positions were cut, and you were asked Onboard their replacement. These people were told they were in the same position in a different country and they weren't happy about it, it was a tough day.

Thomas Wouters, who posted this news, is introduced as "Google employee, Python Steering Committee, Release Lead for Python 3.12 and 3.13."

This news alarmed many developers in the field, including Soumith Chintala, founder of PyTorch and Meta Distinguished Engineer:

The most discussed thing is of course the reason for the cancellation.

Google did not completely abandon the Python basic team, but disbanded the original team in the United States and rebuilt the team in Munich, Germany.

This approach should be based on cost considerations:

Google pays employees by region salary. As I recall, San Francisco, New York and Seattle were full wages, and other areas had a certain percentage discount. If you live in the United States but not in one of these metropolitan areas, wages are likely to be around 15% lower.

Yesterday’s layoffs appear to be viewed as a reorganization. Some teams have been disbanded entirely. Some have merged (two teams → one team).

There does seem to be a pattern that favors people in low-cost areas. For example, two teams merge and the higher-cost manager is laid off, or the entire team is laid off and those responsibilities are then reassigned to people in the lower-paid office.

Given the high wages Google pays its American employees, to some extent, layoffs will significantly increase profits. But there are many benefits to recruiting in the US – a strong talent pool, keeping teams operating in the same region/time zone, etc.

Some people also pointed out: “What people don’t understand is whether the work they do can really bring 10 people and 5 million people to Google every year. Dollar value, it can still be done by two very smart Python experts. The key to technical layoffs is not that they are not doing important work, but that there are large teams doing things that can basically be done by a two-person team."

The problem is, the team seems to have done a lot of work that is also critical internally at Google:

But this time, some people believe that laying off the basic team is a strategy adopted by Google:

Meta obviously drives most of CPython’s efficiency. The projects listed are mostly stable, so Google would be wise to let the community drive it forward and they just use it (you know, "we have managers who are very good at work-life balance" and "marathon not sprint")

Python inside Google, at least for non-artificial intelligence businesses, feels very different from the defaults found elsewhere in the world. This could have the wide-ranging side effect of ultimately aligning the external Python community.

Thinking about it from another perspective, this may be good news for Meta:

What do you think? ?

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